On Thursday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the replacement of a word in the text of Australia’s national anthem in an effort to make it more inclusive towards Aborigines and fairer in telling the country’s pre-colonial history. In the first lines of the hymn, in the phrase that until yesterday said “Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free” (“We rejoice Australians, because we are young and free”), the word “young” has been replaced with the word “one” and now the hymn says something like “we rejoice Australians, because we are united and free”.
Advance Australia Fair has been the Australian national anthem since 1984, when it replaced God Save the Queen, which until then had been the British and all-country anthem of Commonwealth. The hymn was written by composer Peter Dodds McCormick in 1878, when Australia was still a British colony (gained independence in 1901), and was very successful as a popular and patriotic song. However, the hymn’s text has often been criticized for not representing or recognizing indigenous Australian peoples and instead celebrates the Australian colonial period.
The line that defined the Australians as “young”, for example, referred to colonial Australia, ignoring the island’s millennial pre-colonial history; but several other passages of the hymn had been criticized over time. The definition of the Australian people as “free” was deemed offensive to Australian Aborigines who are still victims of frequent episodes of racism and discrimination, while the passages that allude to the country’s wealth seem not to consider that the vast majority of the approximately 700,000 Australian Aborigines live in poverty and is maintained only thanks to state subsidies.
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Discussions to change or update the anthem had been going on for some time and had become more intense in recent times, when among other things some Aboriginal players from the Australian rugby league refused to sing the anthem before matches. In November, the premier of the Australian state of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, had proposed to replace the word “young” with “one”, to intervene on what was probably the most contested verse of the hymn. Berejiklian herself, of the conservative Liberal Party, had spoken of a “symbolic” gesture, but her proposal was welcomed by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Ken Wyatt, and several public figures.
Prime Minister Morrison – of the Liberal Party – has announced the change of lyrics of the hymn in an article published Thursday on Sydney Morning Herald titled “It’s Time to Recognize Australia is United and Free”. Morrison explained that it is right to recognize that even if the Australian nation is young, its history is millennial and added that he believes that «changing ‘young and free’ to ‘one and free’ doesn’t take anything away, but adds a lot». One of the arguments against changing the anthem was that any change would effectively erase a piece of the country’s history. Morrison’s decision was also welcomed by Anthony Albanese, leader of the Labor Party, Australia’s main opposition party.
– Read also: Whose Aboriginal Flag Is It?
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